Campaigning online the internet in u s elections

By The Washington Post | PUBLISHED: January 31, 2019 at 12:40 pm | UPDATED: January 31, 2019 at 12:41 pm By Tony Romm | Washington Post Twitter revealed Thursday that it had removed thousands of malicious accounts thought to have originated in Iran, Russia and Venezuela for spreading disinformation online, including previously undisclosed efforts to target the 2018 U.S. midterm election. In the months before American voters went to the polls, some of these campaigns with foreign ties sought to stoke social and political unrest around hot-button issues, the company said, echoing tactics that social-media companies have spent two years trying to counter. The approach had been adopted by the Internet Research Agency, an organization with ties to the Russian government, two years earlier in an attempt to steer the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. Twitter said it removed 418 accounts believed to have originated in Russia prior to Election Day last November, but … [Read more...] about Twitter takes down accounts targeting U.S. elections

Leading up to this year’s midterm election, scores of U.S. senators, intelligence officials, and security experts were sounding the alarm: do nothing, and what happened in 2016 will happen again. “We know foreign adversaries are still targeting our upcoming elections,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar in a letter dated May 9. “The open question is, how serious are we about preventing it from happening again?” The wide-ranging campaign carried out by the government of Russia, in concert with other non-governmental entities, to influence the 2016 presidential election shocked the U.S. political and media establishment. It exposed vulnerabilities seemingly everywhere, from social media, where foreign operatives ginned up division on Facebook, to the political parties, where top officials’ emails were hacked and released, to the infrastructure of the voting process itself, which experts worried was weak and could be manipulated. Klobuchar and other lawmakers … [Read more...] about The 2018 midterm elections weren’t marred by foreign meddling. That doesn’t mean the U.S. election system is secure

LONDON — Facebook said it blocked 115 accounts for suspected "coordinated inauthentic behavior" linked to foreign groups attempting to interfere in Tuesday's U.S. midterm elections. The social media company shut down 30 Facebook accounts and 85 Instagram accounts and is investigating them in more detail, it said in a blog post late Monday. Facebook acted after being tipped off Sunday by U.S. law enforcement officials. Authorities notified the company about recently discovered online activity "they believe may be linked to foreign entities," Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, wrote in the post . U.S. tech companies have stepped up their work against disinformation campaigns, aiming to stymie online troublemakers' efforts to divide voters and discredit democracy. Facebook's purge is part of countermeasures to prevent abuses like those used by Russian groups two years ago to sway public opinion ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The company based … [Read more...] about Facebook blocks 115 accounts ahead of U.S. midterm elections